Revik

by J. C. Andrijeski

  His posture was deceptively casual.

  His hands sat on his hips, the fingers long and strangely pale-looking under the Southeast Asian sun. He wore the same dark T-shirt she remembered from the meeting hall, but he now had mirrored shades on, blocking her view of those pale, clear eyes.

  She grew more aware than ever of the gun he assuredly wore under that leather jacket.

  “Who are you?” he demanded. “Are you going to tell me?”

  She met his gaze, not intimidated really, but certainly taken aback.

  That silver light continued to spark and harden around his form. She knew he was likely accustomed to intimidating people, and not only due to his race.

  He must have picked up on some element of her thought, because his posture changed subtly. He backed up without seeming to––with his aleimi, or living light, as much as with his actual body. As he did, his shoulders lost some of their tension.

  She felt a flicker of what might have been embarrassment on him, or perhaps doubt at his own assumptions.

  Now, when he looked at her, she felt other things in his light, too, perhaps because he had opened himself somewhat in an attempt to discern more about her. That hard silver remained the most obvious thing, what had become the signature of the Org and their followers, which included all of those who lived within the Rooks’ network.

  But she felt a different frequency there, as he continued to try to get a read on her.

  Clearly, the fact that she hadn’t panicked at the sight of him––after she’d very obviously been following him, as he accused––had thrown him off-balance.

  She could almost see him rethinking his own approach, now that he hadn’t gotten the reaction he expected. He looked at her with a wary kind of compulsion now as well, as if he couldn’t quite make himself look away from her.

  She felt this more in his light than saw in his features, of course, which remained obscured by the mirrored sunglasses and the stillness of a trained infiltrator’s face.

  “What do you want from me?” he said. “Did someone send you?”

  She held up a calming hand. “No,” she said simply.

  There was another silence.

  Again, he handled that silence less gracefully than she did.

  After more seconds ticked by, he shifted his balance on his feet yet again, stepping back from her physically, as well as with his light. She was about to attempt to say something, when the doors behind her opened, letting out a cool breath of that rose-scented air, and causing his face to shift directions, his eyes undoubtedly focusing behind her from the other side of those mirrored glasses.

  She watched him take in whoever had joined them on the outside patio.

  Kali herself did not turn, but felt the humans pause as they saw the two of them facing off. When Dehgoies Revik looked back at her, or it felt like he did, Kali raised an eyebrow, as if to ask him what he wanted to do now.

  “Will you talk to me?” he said, his voice carefully polite that time.

  He made a graceful gesture towards the tables and chairs that dotted the other side of the pool. Both the gesture and the change in his light surprised her, if only because they told her he had received formal schooling at one point.

  Yet another thing to add to her understanding of him.

  “…Please, sister,” he added, using formal Prexci once the humans had moved past them and out of earshot. “I will not harm you.”

  Clearly, he wanted her to know she had guessed correctly.

  Regarding his schooling, at least.

  She nodded, once, following the indications of his hand to walk in front of him.

  She could almost hear Uye yelling in her ear, and wondered if he watched her from the Barrier even now, biting his lip and cursing under his breath for her allowing herself to be taken in by him so easily.

  But really, Kali found this development a relief.

  He had certainly saved her time.

  Dehgoies Revik waited for her to sit in one of the folding wooden chairs before he joined her in another on the opposite side of the same table.

  The table came equipped with a glass ash tray, as well as an umbrella sticking through a hole in its middle, open to a white canopy overhead to shield them from the hot, Southeast Asian sun. Wide, woven fans rimmed that edge of the pool, just like they did indoors, held together with ropes and pulleys and run from some kind of generator inside the kitchen, off to the left of the glass doors leading back into the main hotel.

  They moved lazily behind her, pushing air against her skin. A dozen or so paces from where they sat, a bar stood in the shade of a few palm trees.

  The bar was where the group of five humans now clustered, still watching them curiously.

  Kali recognized all of them as guests of the hotel.

  Some even seemed to more or less live here, on assignment with one or another newspaper or magazine. Like the foreigners from the lobby, every one of them was male. All five of them wore cheap suits, rumpled with sweat, their collars open at their necks.

  These same men, most of whom she’d seen staring at her for the past few days, seemed especially fascinated with Dehgoies Revik, likely because they assumed him to be the mysterious Westerner with whom she shared her bed.

  Kali knew from her brief scans that her own ethnicity frustrated them, even as they contemplated bedding her themselves. Now they wanted to know what nationality this new, strange male claimed, in addition to being curious about hers.

  She assumed they saw him as some kind of unwanted intruder into their mating pool, and quickly wanted to categorize him, either for dismissal or some kind of direct challenge.

  Kali was tired of being seen as an “exotic” by some categories of human males, even though she knew she’d suffered that indignity far less than most of her sisters.

  From their living light, Kali picked up that two of them speculated Dehgoies as a civilian contractor of some kind, or perhaps C.I.A.

  “Sister,” Dehgoies said politely. “Can I get you a drink?”

  She glanced at him, and saw that he’d taken off the mirrored sunglasses, leaving two red marks on either side of his nose from the frames, but his eyes clear and intent-looking.

  She suspected that was an attempt at manners, too, and smiled.

  “Yes,” she said. “I would like whatever you are having.”

  He quirked an eyebrow at her, but she managed to make him smile that time.

  “I can perhaps do better than that for you, my sister,” he said.

  She smiled, giving him a nod.

  “I defer to your judgment then, my kind brother.”

  Again, he gave her a look that bordered on a smile.

  He seemed to have relaxed somewhat in her presence, however, and far sooner than she would have expected. She noticed something else in his light that time, too. A flicker of separation pain left him in a whisper––muted, but intense enough, even from behind his light’s shield, that it startled her a little.

  So he was lonely.

  He gave her a hard look at that, even as he finished motioning towards a waiter.

  Clearly, he thought she had overstepped with him that time, by not hiding her appraisal of his emotional state.

  Even so, he didn’t pull his light away from hers entirely, and it struck her suddenly, nearly making her laugh aloud, why he was nervous around her now.

  “I am mated,” she told him gently.

  He nodded, once, but that other look never left his eyes.

  “I have a girlfriend,” he said.

  He said the words almost as a challenge, but she didn’t think they were untrue.

  “We are a bonded pair,” Kali said only, her voice softer still.

  He nodded again, but that time, she saw a flicker of surprise touch his clear eyes. He scanned her light, surreptitiously that time. No doubt he was looking for the tell-tale structure that would support her claim of a bonded mate.

  She didn’t attempt to hide it from him, but g
azed out over the pool, relaxing into the sunlight and shadow play over the smooth, white stone that formed the pool’s rim. She smiled at the waiter when he brought over their drinks, and it struck her suddenly, that Dehgoies must have used his light in the human’s mind to order them, rather than waiting to tell him in person.

  So Dehgoies Revik wasn’t particularly patient, either.

  Or worried about being ID’d as a seer.

  When the human waiter left them, leaving behind two drinks sweating on the table under the shade of the umbrella, Dehgoies Revik’s eyes clicked back into focus.

  He nodded again, once, almost without seeming to realize he had done so.

  His long fingers encircled his glass, what looked like bourbon or perhaps another type of whiskey on ice. As he more or less promised, he had gotten her something different than what he had acquired for himself.

  In fact, what he ordered for her didn’t smell or feel as if it had alcohol in it at all, for which she was more than a little grateful. He must have gotten that from her light, too, which was more polite than not, under the circumstances.

  It was also, perhaps, a message of its own.

  She took a sip, and was pleased to find the drink consisted of fresh-squeezed lemonade with ginger, and strong in both.

  Gracing him with a smile, she took another sip.

  “Thank you,” she said. “An excellent choice, my brother.”

  “Are you going to tell me why you have been following me?” he countered, his voice still polite, still subdued from before. “Do we know one another, sister?”

  “No,” she said, lowering her glass back to the table with a sigh. “We do not. I wished to introduce myself to you, brother.”

  “Why?”

  Curiosity edged the word that time, but also that harder wariness. People from the old world generally did not approach him with benign intent, she knew.

  He was still thinking about sex with her, as well.

  It was confusing him.

  Kali made a soothing gesture, almost without knowing she did it, and without thinking how it might look to the male humans watching them from the bamboo-fronted bar.

  “Brother, it is a difficult thing,” she said. “I am not toying with you, I promise. I am merely trying to determine an appropriate entry point. It may take some time to explain––”

  “I have time,” he said, blunt.

  “Do you?” She smiled at him, quirking an eyebrow back in his direction. “You have seemed to me to be quite busy since I arrived here.”

  “And when was that, exactly?” he said, wary again.

  “Five days ago,” she said without hesitation.

  She didn’t know if he had known that already, and had been seeking truth from her, or if he worried it had been a longer time than what she answered.

  Either way, something in her response relaxed him still more.

  He leaned back in the chair, gazing out over the same view of the pool. She watched him sip the bourbon, and again felt that flicker of pain in his light. With it came a more specific hurt, one that had more of a flavor of loneliness than she’d felt from him before.

  She might have winced, if she hadn’t been so close to his light already.

  “Brother,” she said with a sigh. “I don’t know how much my words will mean to you right now. But you have featured prominently in my mind for some time.”

  He turned at that, sharply that time.

  He didn’t speak, so she made another reassuring gesture before she continued.

  “…I am a prescient,” she told him quietly. “A real one.”

  He blinked, once.

  She saw him attempt to suppress the surprise that time, and fail.

  Taking another drink to cover his reaction, he turned his gaze back over the pool, where a white woman in a blood red bikini was wading into the shallow end by slowly and deliberately descending the stairs.

  Kali felt another flicker off his light when the woman smiled at him, clearly including him in her somewhat heavy-handed show for the watching males.

  The group of men by the bar stared at the woman in the pool, too.

  Looking away from the water and the skin exposed by the bikini, Dehgoies Revik stared directly at Kali’s face, not hiding his scrutiny that time.

  “Are you about to tell me I’m going to die, sister?” he said.

  It looked like an attempt at humor.

  It even sounded like one, but she didn’t feel anything like humor in his light.

  “No,” Kali said, smiling at him. “Nothing like that.”

  His frown deepened.

  She watched him tilt the glass with the bourbon, causing the ice slivers to swirl lazily inside the amber fluid. He looked up at her again.

  “But you came all the way here,” he said. “It can’t be trivial.”

  “It is not,” she said, her voice serious. “––Trivial. Particularly not to me.”

  He nodded, but his eyes appeared distant now.

  She wondered if he was attempting to scan her again, even as his mind seemed strangely preoccupied with sex, both in relation to the woman in the pool, as well as the shape of Kali’s own body outlined by the form-fitting dress.

  It seemed almost to be a defense mechanism with him, however. She felt more of a pushing away from the invasiveness of his light than the reverse. She wondered if he’d learned to keep others away from him by being inappropriate in that regard, as well.

  But he must have heard that, too, or some small part of it.

  His light retracted.

  “Apologies, sister,” he murmured. “I am simply confused.”

  “I would be surprised if you were not,” Kali said.

  Still, the politeness touched her.

  Leaning closer impulsively, she clasped his arm, sending him a pulse of warmth.

  The gesture made him wince, both with his body and his light, but he didn’t pull away. He didn’t look up from his glass, either.

  “I mean you no harm, Revik,” she told him, quieter.

  “Why would you wish me anything else, beautiful sister?” he said, smiling faintly, but without humor.

  “I wish only to help you,” she assured him, ignoring the hardness behind his words. “My reasons for this may be selfish in part, but they are no less sincere for that… and no less urgent.”

  He raised those clear eyes, meeting her gaze directly.

  The bitterness there lay undisguised.

  Rather than pushing her away, however, Kali found the look there drew her that time. He was a person, after all… and a seer. She could glimpse both things behind that silver intensity of light. Enough that she felt the silver, strangling lights and presences react to Kali’s own aleimi with colder, darker sparks of anger.

  She had hurt his feelings with her admission of selfishness, as much as she knew she could never persuade him to admit that fact. Whoever held his leash these days did not like him opening himself up enough to make himself that vulnerable.

  The fact that he still could open himself, though, at least to a degree, reassured her.

  “I will have a daughter,” she said, direct. “In a number of years.”

  Again, that wince. Again, a flicker of surprise crossing those clear eyes.

  Again, he did not interrupt her, however.

  She liked that about him, she realized.

  Taking another breath, she continued.

  “For you to be with her, at least in the way you are meant to be with her,” Kali added carefully. “You cannot remain with this group… the Org. You cannot. It is of the utmost importance that you hear me on this point, Dehgoies Revik.”

  He gave her an incredulous look, his narrow mouth now curled in a suspicious frown.

  “You cannot,” Kali repeated. “I do not mean this as a matter of morality––”

  His hard voice cut hers off.

  “What do you mean it as, then, sister?” he said.

  That angry bitterness had fallen back ove
r his light, closing him off, even touching his eyes, turning them into one-way glass rather than those clear panes she had just witnessed.

  Kali took another breath, without letting go of his arm.

  “I mean it as a matter of practicality,” she explained, stroking his brown skin. “I mean, you will not find her through them. It will separate the two of you, if you remain with them. It will be more of a barrier than either of you can surmount.”

  He gave her another, deeper look of disbelief.

  Then he leaned back abruptly in the wooden chair.

  He moved fast––hard enough to force a loud creak from the chair’s hinges.

  He slid his arm out from under her touch as he did it, but did not move it any further than that.

  Despite the distance he had forced between them, Kali found herself aware of the reality of him once more. She could smell his sweat, feel the flicker of nerves and confusion in his light, like feathers over her own.

  She found herself noticing a white scar that curled up his neck from under the collar of the jacket, and a dark stain on the lower part of his black shirt, a smudge of dirt and dust on the other side of his neck. She found herself aware of the bones of his chest showing in the V made by his T-shirt’s neck, the shadow of stubble on his jaw and cheeks.

  It was difficult not to touch him.

  The aloneness there was overpowering, when she sat so close to him. She wondered if his girlfriend helped him at all with this.

  He gave a low, humorless grunt, his eyes hardening as he raised the glass to his lips.

  She watched his Adam’s apple move as he took a long couple of swallows.

  His light didn’t change, despite the distance in his eyes.

  She felt his light continue to touch hers, in fact, almost compulsively now, a kind of panicked tremble there, somewhere in the vicinity of his heart. She felt that along with a harder desire, something that probably wouldn’t be slaked by the woman in the bikini who now side-stroked through the pool in front of them, still trying to catch his eye.

  “Why should I care about your daughter?” he said, lowering the glass.

  “You will care,” Kali assured him. “In fact, I strongly suspect you will care deeply, even if you choose to remain with your Org. You have a past connection, you and she.”